Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is not worried about Apex Legends

According to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, Fortnite gained an Apex Legends worth of players since Respawn's battle royale launched a month ago. Sweeney said that their battle royale king should soon hit another milestone - 250 million players.

Fortnite has been the world's most popular game for quite some time, and whenever some new and interesting battle royale game launches and attracts solid player numbers, words like "Fortnite Killer" start to float around. The same happened with the latest battle royale title - Apex Legends, the game that is probably the second most popular title in the world right now.

Apex Legends may have broken a couple of records set by Epic's Fortnite, and it's on the way to close the gap to battle royale king even more if the player numbers continue to rise at the same pace, but none of that concerns Epic Games CEO, Tim Sweeney.

Speaking in an interview with Venture Beat on GDG 2019, Sweeney said that Fortnite hasn't seen a drop off because of Respawn's title, quite the contrary, the player numbers are higher than ever and Fortnite "gained an Apex Legends worth of players" since EA launched Apex Legends.

Sweeney also said that Fortnite is very close to hitting 250 million players and that the game hit a non-event peak twice after Apex was out. "We haven’t seen any visible cut into Fortnite. It’s a funny thing. The only game you can see where its peaks cut into Fortnite playtime is FIFA," Sweeney explained.

Epic CEO is also glad that games are still bringing fresh features and their own unique spin to battle royale genre to keep advancing the state of the industry. Sweeney thinks that Apex Legends has re-energised a lot of shooter players and those who regularly drop in and out of shooter games depending on what's popular.

The latest data from Respawn Entertainment shows that Apex Legends reached 50 million players in its first month, with more than 2 million concurrent players. The graph below shows the rise of both Fortnite and Apex Legends and you can see just how big Apex Legends' launch actually was.

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Apex Legends vs Fortnite

Superdata's recent report revealed that Apex Legends generated more than $92 million from in-game purchases which puts it just behind FIFA 19, Fortnite and Anthem on the February 2019 top grossing titles table.